Vojislav Seselj

Vojislav Seselj (11 October 1954-) was Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia from 24 March 1998 to 24 October 2000, succeeding Dragan Tomic and preceding Nebojsa Covic. As the founder of the nationalist Serbian Progressive Party, Seselj was Leader of the Opposition several times during the 2000s.

Biography
Vojislav Seselj was born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia in 1954 to a family of Bosnian Serbs, and he was involved with the League of Communists of Yugoslavia's youth organizations. In the early 1980s, he began to associate himself with nationalist intellectuals in Belgrade, and he blamed Muslims in higher education for his inability to advance his educational aspirations. Throughout the 1980s, he was repeatedly fired and re-hired from being a professor due to his nationalist views, and he went into exile in the United States in 1989. There, exiled monarchist World War II partisan Momcilo Dujic named him "Vojvoda of the Chetniks", and Seselj became a devout anti-communist. In 1989, he founded his own "Serbian National Renewal" party, followed by the Serbian Renewal Movement in 1990 and the Serbian Radical Party in 1991. Seselj became a close ally of Slobodan Milosevic, but, in 1993, the two drifted apart after Milosevic withdrew his support of the nationalist Republika Srpska and claimed that Seselj personified violence and primitivism. In 1994 and 1995, Seselj was imprisoned for his opposition to Milosevic. In 1998, as the Kosovo War escalated, Seselj joined Milosevic's government, and he served as Deputy Prime Minister from 1998 to 2000. In 2003, he surrendered to the ICTY war crimes tribunal, but his trial did not begin until 2007, and he was known to regularly insult the judges and court prosecutors. In 2014, he was allowed to return to Serbia to undergo cancer treatment, and his SRS party won 23 seats in parliament in 2016. That same year, he was acquitted of his war crimes charges. However, in 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison after MICT appealed the acquittal.